A meat tax would be costly for consumer health and the environment, experts have insisted after a new report claimed the measure could help governments meet climate change commitments.
The report, published today by the Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return initiative (FAIRR), claimed it was “increasingly probable” that governments would impose a “behavioural” tax on meat as they look to fulfil their climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.
A “global consensus” around meat’s negative impact on climate change and health meant meat was on the same “pathway to taxation” as sugar and tobacco, it said.
“If policymakers are to cover the true cost of livestock epidemics like avian flu and human epidemics like obesity, diabetes and cancer, while also tackling the twin challenges of climate change and antibiotic resistance, then a shift from subsidisation to taxation of the meat industry looks inevitable,” said Jeremy Coller, CIO of Coller Capital and founder of the FAIRR Initiative.
Politicians in Sweden and Denmark have already debated a tax on meat, with proposals in Denmark suggesting a figure of $2.7 per kilogram of meat.
The FAIRR report suggested food companies should consider adopting an internal ‘shadow price’ of meat to account for future costs, in the same way companies heavily exposed to fossil fuels manage an internal price on carbon.
Potentially dangerous
However, Mick Sloyan, senior strategy director for pork at AHDB, warned a meat tax was an “incredibly blunt tool for a complex problem” that would have “negative implications” for consumer health.
“The suggested change would ultimately push up prices and hit consumers in the pocket at a time when there is already massive uncertainty about what will happen to food prices as we come out of the EU. This makes the suggestion unhelpful as well as unnecessary,” he said.
Prof Robert Pickard of the Meat Advisory Panel (MAP) warned a tax on meat would “disproportionately penalise groups like the elderly and pregnant women”, for whom red meat is a vital source of key nutrients such as iron and folate.
“This suggestion is ill-considered and potentially dangerous,” he said. “The government risks the health of our nation if it were to pursue a policy that encouraged consumers to cut out one specific food group.”
Negative impact
The Sustainable Food Trust is also “strongly opposed” to the idea of a meat tax, because it would “have a serious negative impact on the sustainability of farming in the UK”, according to policy director Richard Young.
“Seventy-one percent of UK farmland is under grass if we include rough grazing and common land, and most of this land is not suitable for crop production, being either too steep, wet, acidic or stony,” he said.
“Grazing livestock is the only way to get food from such land, but beef production in particular and to a slightly less extent lamb production is only barely profitable already. Any further decline in demand for red meat would see large areas of land abandoned and many farmers forced out of business.”
Where grassland could be converted to crop production, the carbon emissions released into the atmosphere during the process would “exceed the impact of ruminant emissions for at least the next 25 years”, Young said.
Biodiversity would also be lost if grassland were converted permanently to crops, he added.
The Sustainable Food Trust argues that a more effective way to combat the problems from intensive meat production would be a small tax on nitrogen fertiliser, which would level the playing field between farmers rearing livestock on grass and those with more intensive systems that rely on grain.
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